St Paul's Cathedral is an impressive setting for dance, and on Tuesday, as part of the City of London Festival, English National Ballet presented a new work, Silent Monologues, by Estonian dancer Thomas Edur. The piece marks the retirement from the stage of Edur and his wife Agnes Oaks, the most lustrous partnership in British ballet since Anthony Dowell and Antoinette Sibley. Set to music by six Estonian composers, it is a suite of dances for three couples. Edur is a passionate advocate of narrative dance, and while this work is essentially a plotless response to the music, there is also an unmistakable plaiting of fragmentary story-strands. Begoña Cao seems to yearn for departure, her yearning gaze and lyrical port de bras expressive of profound loss, while James Forbat restrains her with tender understanding. The tone sharpens with the subsequent couples, proceeding through taut-stretched conflict to resolution. Edur's strength as a choreographer lies in his ability to convey complex emotional states through balletic line, but he needs to resist the temptation to underscore his work with overwrought displays of "acting". The dance tells the story, as his own career so eloquently testifies.

Later in the evening, Edur and Oaks gave their final performance. The piece was Les Sylphides, the perfect expression of his romanticism and her gentle ethereality. His jumps are still soft, her line still pure, and the love and trust that has always informed their partnership was radiantly manifest. The ENB ensemble provided sympathetic support, flitting through the cathedral nave to the stage like spectres released from the crypt; there was a happy if unintended piquancy in this elision of the pagan and the Anglican.

Koen Augustijnen is one of the choreographers of the Ballets C de

la B (Contemporains de la Belgique), the collective founded by Alain Platel in 1984 and based in Ghent, and last week he presented his new work, Ashes, at London's Southbank. The set, an assembly of grey modules resembling a more-than-usually depressing holiday complex, is fronted by an open area in which dancers wait in attitudes of lethargy and dejection. Zombie-like, they awaken and stumble around the stage, and we infer that some disaster, either actual or metaphorical, has overtaken them. Meanwhile, alto Steve Dugardin and soprano Amaryllis Dieltiens sing passages of Handel, very beautifully.

Augustijnen tells us the piece was inspired in part by the realisation that he would not be able to dance for ever - that, in his words, "playtime was over" - and in part by the death of his father. Given these events, he realised, some sort of future strategy had to be elaborated: "You have to reposition yourself, and look for a new balance." This is an opaque concept, not clarified by the decision to seek "movement material based on the elements of fire and water". The result is an evening-length montage of free-running, pratfalls, somersaults and collapses, and if this is intermittently amusing, it's thanks to the wit and skill of the individual performers, particularly the acrobatic Gaël Santisteva.

At the same time there's a strong sense of deja vu, probably due to the presence in the creative team of Guy Cools, here credited as dramaturge. In 2005 Cools was involved in the creation of the very successful Zero Degrees with Akram Khan and Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, and since that date has applied a similar template to numerous productions, arguably with diminishing results. Sacred Monsters (2006) and In-i (2008), both collaborations involving Khan, proved only that the fashionable trappings of conceptual dance amount to very little if they don't actually frame an idea. The Handel music in Ashes is wonderful, but then baroque music as an accompaniment to abject contemporary dance content is very much in vogue at the moment. Alan Platel's pitié, another Cools production, used it in a near-identical way earlier this year, as did Cools's and Augustijnen's Import Export in 2007. Watching Ashes, you have the inescapable sense of a production line. Augustijnen's intentions are sincere but his touch is dour, and the long tracts of semi-processed improvisatory material ultimately wear you down.

Thursday night saw a propitious event at the Hackney Empire, as Ballet Black presented a strong mixed bill to a sell-out house. This attractive young neoclassical company, just six dancers strong, was founded in 2001 by Anglo-Trinidadian Cassa Pancho. Although they've never performed in Hackney before, there was a sense of the occasion's rightness - of homecoming, almost - as a mostly black audience sounded its enthusiastic approval. The programme ranged from Martin Lawrance's Pendulum, a probing, sophisticated duet to which Cira Robinson and Jazmon Voss brought a crackling sexual charge, to Will Tuckett's Depouillement, a beautifully crafted chamber-ballet whose shifting moods saw the company at full, confident stretch, especially a radiant Sarah Kundi, dancing the lead.